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Nintendo Stock Drops 6 Percent Following Loss Forecast

Nintendo's once-market-leading franchises have been struggling in recent years.

The creator of the Mario game franchise sees more than a billion dollars wiped off its market value, but still leaves it with a larger capitalization than rival Sony.

TOKYO – Nintendo's stock closed down more than 6 percent in Tokyo on Monday, reducing the Japanese video game company's market value by more than $1 billion.

The drop came following Friday's profit warning from the company, which now predicts a third year of losses in a row. It made the prediction of a loss of $335 million for the year ending March after Japanese markets had closed Friday.

In early Monday trading, Nintendo's stock was down as much 18.5 percent. It then recovered to finish the day down 6.1 percent at $131.87 (¥13,745).

Shares of the Mario Bros. game franchise creator had been on a good run recently, going as high as ¥15,850 ($152) early in the year on news that China would start allowing video game consoles to go back on sale in the country following a ban of more than a decade.

The Chinese console and software market could be worth tens of billions of dollars, though Nintendo is likely to be behind rivals Sony Corp. and Microsoft, which successfully launched the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, respectively, at the end of 2013. Meanwhile, Nintendo's Wii U has continued to underperform.

Despite the Monday drop, Nintendo's Japanese market capitalization of $19.9 billion (¥2.075 trillion) remained larger than that of Sony's $17.74 billion (¥1.849 trillion).